The Spare Key on Dad’s Hook

Home

I drove the mile to Dad’s house with the new wipers and the full tank and the oil fresh, and when I pulled into the gravel drive, Dad put his hand on my arm.

“Let me put her away,” he said.

So I got out and walked around, and Dad slid over behind the wheel, and I stood in the yard and watched my eighty-five-year-old father back his pickup around the house and into the weedy spot beside the shed in one clean move, without touching a single one of Mom’s old flower beds.

He shut it off and sat there a minute with both hands on the wheel.

Then he climbed down and took the spare key out of the ignition, walked up to the back door, and hung it back on the hook my mother screwed into the frame.

“There,” he said.

He took off his cap and hung it on its hook. He hung his barn coat beside it.

He put the kettle on, and we sat at the kitchen table, and the sun came across the yard and lay on the hood of the green truck like it had never left.

Sunday

On Sunday morning Dad drove himself to church. I sat with him in the third pew on the left, where he and Mom sat for fifty-one years, and when the hymn came around that he had been humming in the truck, he sang every verse without the book.

After the service he did not go to the fellowship hall for coffee. He walked straight out to the gravel lot, climbed into the pickup and waited for me to get in beside him.

We drove the four miles south to the township cemetery in bright noon sun.

The cedars by the bend were dark green against all that brown, and the wind had piled oak leaves against every stone in the place.

Dad parked by the fence and walked down the row to Mom’s grave. He stood there with his cap in his hands.

Then he knelt, slow, one knee and then the other, and began brushing the leaves off her stone with the flat of his palm.

I stood back by the truck and let him have it. He talked to her a while. I could not hear what he said, and I did not try to.

When he came back up the row he was wiping his eyes with the back of his hand, not hiding it. He got into the passenger side this time and let me drive.

“I told her where I’d been,” he said. “I told her I’d been walking to the cafe like a young man, and she laughed at me. I could hear her.”

I reached over and held his hand on the seat between us. It was cold and dry and very strong.

We sat there a while with the engine running and the heater on before I put it in gear.